official story of Judaic myth and religion is contained in
the books of the Old Testament, which are thought to have been
compiled circa 1000 BC. Until the late-19th century,
it was assumed that these books constituted a unique and
account of the origins of mankind and Western civilisation.
But then came the discoveries of older, parallel texts in
ancient Near East, many dating back to the 2nd and 3rd millennia
BC. Accordingly, it is now widely appreciated that the Old
Testament is but a continuation and adaptation of these earlier
religious writings. As the renowned Sumerologist Samuel N.
Kramer explained in his 1956 book ‘History Begins at
discoveries made in Egypt and in the Near East in the past
hundred years have opened our
eyes to a
spiritual and cultural heritage undreamed of
by earlier generations... a bright and revealing light has been shed
on the background and origin of the Bible itself. We can now
that this greatest of literary
classics did not come upon the scene full-blown, like an artificial flower
in a vacuum; its roots reach deep into the distant
past and spread wide across the
surrounding lands. Both in form and content, the biblical books bear
no little resemblance to the literatures created by earlier
civilisations in the Near
be fair, the Old Testament books are distinctive from earlier
literatures in quite a few respects. For example:
religion is strictly monotheistic. There is One God. There is
And the gods are largely occulted from view.
• God is disembodied from the beginning. When he creates the Universe,
he does so ‘at arm’s length’. Accordingly, he is not to be
regarded as a Sun-god, a Moon-god, or a star-god; and nor is he to be worshipped
via any symbolic image.
• God’s act of creation is non-cataclysmic. His cataclysmic role
is historicised, to feature only in post-creation events such as the Flood, the
Tower of Babel, and Sodom and Gomorrah, and the descent upon Mount Sinai.
• God takes a special interest in the Jewish people, and intervenes in
the course of history to establish them in ‘the promised land’.
• On the question of religious philosophy, the afterlife is denied
to the common man. ‘For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’.
• The books provide a complete ‘history’ from the creation
of man to the events of the present day.
the emphasis is less on the creation myth, and more on philosophy
and the political history of the Jewish nation.
net effect of these differences is that the Old Testament is
valued more for its historical and philosophical
for its revelations
the meaning of God and the creation myth. Indeed,
on the latter questions the books
seem to give away as little as possible.
if one takes an overview of the Old Testament in the light
of the earlier pagan religions, a pattern
of the old pagan
religions. For example:
• God is a deity of many names: he is variously called Elohim, Yahweh,
Adonai, and El Shaddai.
• God is said to have fought a cosmic battle against a sea-monster named
Rahab, whom he pierced, cut into pieces, and flung into the abyss.
• God may be depicted in human-like form, experiencing human-like emotions,
and yet he typically manifests himself with phenomena such as bright light, fire,
thunder, arrows, a storm of meteorites, or a flood. When he descends from the
sky, the earth trembles, splits open, or melts before his presence.
• God’s creation of the Universe begins with a proto-earth that is
submerged in a flood of water. This is identical to the Egyptian myth of creation.
• To create the Universe, God separates light from darkness (i.e. soul
from body), and separates waters from waters (i.e. the sky-ocean from the terrestrial
ocean). He then causes the land of the proto-earth to rise above the waters.
Again, this is identical to the Egyptian myth of creation.
• God creates man in his own image, using the clay of the earth. Certain
passages in the Old Testament suggest that man was cast down from a heavenly
paradise, whilst the Garden of Eden story in the Book of Genesis attests to a
period of man’s existence in the underworld. These ideas follow the Sumerian
authorises a Great Flood to destroy mankind and all living things.
Although this is portrayed as a historic
event, it closely follows an incident in the Sumerian creation
the Hebrew priests’ best efforts to distance their religion
from the pagan creation cults, the influence of the latter
can be identified and traced.
This allows us to conclude that
the God of the Old Testament is a made-over version of the
Gods of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. In other words, he is
who personified the act of creation.
Bible, Old Testament.
Alford, ‘When The Gods Came Down’,
Hodder and Stoughton, 2000.
W. W. Norton and Co., 1996.